


pockets full of stones

by sixthmoon (seventhstar)



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:56:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27679081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhstar/pseuds/sixthmoon
Summary: Nile tries to talk her out of it.There are innocent people in this building,she says.It’ll attract too much attention. Joe and Nicky wouldn’t have wanted this. We have to go.Booker says nothing. He tries, once, to touch Joe, to close his dead blank eyes. Andy breaks his fingers. Then his arm. Then his neck.They burn the building down behind them.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache & Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 29
Kudos: 295





	pockets full of stones

**Author's Note:**

> for this kink meme prompt:  
> https://theoldguardkinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/4108.html?thread=1318156#cmt1318156
> 
> Andy doesn’t lose her immortality, Nicky and Joe do. By the time Andy and Booker are brought into the lab Kozak and Merrick are furious because two of the immortals died a day into the experiments?! The hell?! Nile breaks Andy and Booker out but how can they now deal with what happened?

The house in Malta is Joe and Nicky’s. 

Andy sleeps on the floor in the living room. _They probably fucked here,_ she thinks, though that goes for everything in this house, every room, every piece of furniture, every flat surface. She and Booker were only ever allowed here when Joe and Nicky invited them, and they were only ever invited when Joe and Nicky were done vacationing and ready for company.

Nile suggested, once, that they go somewhere less steeped in memory.

Somewhere where the shelves weren’t heavy with Nicky’s collection of religious texts and Joe’s poetry. Somewhere where the dead didn’t look back at her, smiling, from every painting on the walls. Somewhere where half the rooms didn’t have to be left pristine and untouched, because Joe would have raised hell if she’d made the bed up wrong, and Nicky would hit her with a spatula if she put so much as a spoon back where it didn’t belong. Somewhere where the air didn’t taste like all their run-out laughter.

Andy shot her in the head. 

* * *

(”If we die,” Joe said, “we want to be cremated, not buried.”

“Scatter us where you will,” Nicky added. “Just—together.”

 _We,_ they always said, as if they could erase the possibility of separation by refusing to acknowledge it. Maybe that’s Andy’s problem. Maybe she’d still have Quỳnh if she had a little faith.)

* * *

“Did they go together?”

Booker flinches, licks his lips. “Yeah.”

Andy stares at him in the rearview mirror, ignoring the road in front of her; beside her, she can see Nile wince out of the corner of her eye. No doubt worrying about what’ll happen if they crash. As if it matters.

“Okay, it wasn’t—Nicky went first,” Booker says. He’s cowering against the backseat. “But they were both drugged out of their minds. Joe didn’t make it five minutes. He didn’t know.”

Andy laughs. At least, she thinks she does. Her mouth tastes like smoke. “He knew.”

* * *

Nile takes off soon enough. Or maybe she sticks it out a while. Andy doesn’t know. The days run together for her, an endless parade of sunrises and sunsets with nothing but her own grief for company. 

Booker stays. He drinks. He lurks in the corners, haunting her, too guilty to speak to her and too guilty to go. She doesn’t bother to kill him anymore. She’s lost everything. 

She’s not going to give him the only thing he wants.

* * *

(”What would you do?” she asked. “If you were mortal? Right now?”

They had an answer, of course. A whole life planned, somewhere rural, where Nicky could practice medicine and Joe could paint. Kids, maybe—the longing in their faces had been terrible, even as they both put it away before Booker could see. 

Andy smiled and nodded and hated it. There was no room for her in their idyllic imaginings; she downed vodka from the bottle and hoped it would never happen. _Take me first,_ she thought, _and then they can play happy family all they want.)_

* * *

Nile tries to talk her out of it. _There are innocent people in this building,_ she says. _It’ll attract too much attention. Joe and Nicky wouldn’t have wanted this. We have to go._

Booker says nothing. He tries, once, to touch Joe, to close his dead blank eyes. Andy breaks his fingers. Then his arm. Then his neck.

They burn the building down behind them. 

Nile evacuates, takes Booker with her, tries to minimize collateral damage. 

Andy stays. She watches their skin char, their hair burn. She watches their flesh melt until they’re unrecognizable, until there’s no way to tell them apart. She hears the heat crack their bones. She waits until they’re ash.

* * *

“Copley sent this.”

Andy says nothing.

“It’s, uh, the security footage from Merrick. Copley got it for us. Nothing from the lab, but…he said that there was a video from the van they were in that you might want to see.”

“Do I?”

“What?”

 _“You_ were in that van, Booker.” All three of them taken. The crunch of metal through bone as she hacked through the guards. Her naïve pronouncement to her naïve protégé: _I’m getting them back. Whatever it takes._ Andy shudders. “Do I need to see the video?”

“I don’t know,” Booker says. As he always does. She should have known he’d betrayed them when he stopped being useful. “I got blown up by a grenade. Didn’t shake the gas until we were at Merrick.” 

He exhales. She hates the sound of Booker breathing, now, hates the reminder that he’s taking up air and Joe and Nicky aren’t.

He leaves the disc on the table for her.

* * *

(The inside of a van, crowded with private security. There’s Joe, a little bloodied but otherwise no worse for wear, hands ziptied together. He wakes up and reaches for Nicky. 

She dreamed the two of them long before they met. She saw him kill Nicky a hundred times and a hundred ways, and it was brutal, messy. She saw him bite off chunks of Nicky’s flesh, claw out his eyes, choke the life out of him. But by the time she and Quynh found them, the animosity had faded, the bloodlust cooled. 

Now Joe is so tender, pleading for Nicky to wake up, touching him like he might break. Nicky looks completely exhausted—maybe he’s losing his immortality at this very moment—but he turns to face Joe, like the needle of a compass, swung permanently north.

Andy’s heard variations of this speech before. She’s long tired of it. But Nicky closes the distance between them like the words are all new, like he knows it’s the last time.)

* * *

Andy goes out to the ocean; Joe and Nicky’s house in Malta is on the beach. She teased them relentlessly about it. _What’s the point of a beach house if you never go to the beach? You’re telling me you ever stop fucking long enough to go swimming?_

 _Joe likes the view,_ Nicky said, serene.

 _I like to paint Nicky here,_ Joe added. _In the moonlight._

She still hears Booker jerk awake at night, gasping for air as Quỳnh drowns. _She feels like something insane,_ Nile had said, _something furious._

Andy doesn’t feel anything anymore, not even the water as it laps at her ankles, her thighs, her throat. She starts swimming when her boots stop touching the sand. Already she’s tired, nothing but grief between her skin and bones. She’s sinking down into dark water.

She’s done.


End file.
